The Mumpsimus

Mike Flanagan's Netflix miniseries The Haunting of Hill House  is not an adaptation of the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House . The miniseries is a work of its own, separate, unique — but haunted by The Haunting of Hill House.  And not only The Haunting of Hill House : the miniseries is also haunted by the first adaptation of Jackson's novel, the classic 1963 film  The Haunting , and by numerous other stories and movies ( The Legend of Hell House , The Shining , etc.). During the first few episodes, I thought the connection to Jackson's novel was unnecessary, perhaps even burdensome. I assumed somebody had bought the rights and then, through the tortuous (and torturous) process of Hollywood development, the novel got more and more distant from the project while remaining contractually bound to it. Perhaps, I thought, Flanagan was able to do with this property what he'd done with Ouija: Origin of Evil  and convince the producers to let him make the...

The universe has conspired to turn my research work this summer into mass culture — while I've been toiling away on a fellowship that has me investigating Virginia Woolf's reading in the 1930s and the literary culture of the decade, the mini-series Life in Squares ,  about the Bloomsbury group and Woolf's family, played on the BBC and the film Testament of Youth , based on Vera Brittain's 1933 memoir of her experiences during World War One, played in cinemas. I've now seen both and have mixed feelings about them, though I enjoyed watching each. Life in Squares  offers some good acting and excellent production design, though it never really adds up to much;  Testament of Youth  is powerful and well constructed, even as it falls into some clichés of the WWI movie genre, and it's well worth seeing for its lead performance.  The two productions got me thinking about what we want from biographical movies and tv shows, how we evaluate them, and how they're...

    Jamie Marks Is Dead is based on a book I love by a writer I love: One for Sorrow by Christopher Barzak . I realized recently that I think of it as the first novel of "our" generation/group of writers — Chris is a few months older than me, and originally introduced me to probably half the writers and editors I know. I read One for Sorrow in manuscript, exhorted Juliet Ulman to buy and edit it for Bantam, and celebrated its publication. Chris sent me a copy with the kindest inscription penned onto its title page that any writer has ever given me. I feel like a kind of distant (crazy) uncle to the book, and thus also deeply protective toward it. I didn't read most of the reviews when it was released for fear that I would seek out any negative reviewers and do terrible things to them that would get me arrested.  When I found out it was being made into a movie, I was both excited for Chris and for the higher profile the book would likely gain, and terrified that the ...

Rex Reed  pointed to perhaps the best criticism of the new adaptation of Tolstoy's  Anna Karenina ,  written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Joe Wright, a criticism that is over 100 years old. On 18 September 1905, James Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus about Tolstoy: "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical." Wright's film of Anna Karenina  is often dull, often stupid, sometimes tired, sometimes pedantic, and literally theatrical. I have a fundamental problem with any adaptation of Tolstoy's novel. If someone (e.g., William Faulkner, F.R. Leavis ) were to tell me that Anna Karenina  is the greatest novel ever written, I would not disagree. Not having read all of the novels ever written, I'm not in a position to rank them, but I've certainly never read a better novel than  Anna Karenina  (and I've read  War & Peace, —  but for all its glories and wonders, it falls apart at the end, so Anna ...

A group of friends and I saw Midnight's Children  in its New England premiere as part of the Telluride at Dartmouth program at Dartmouth College. (I saw a bunch of the films last year , but don't have time this year and, in any case, am not as enthusiastic about the selection as I was last year.) The group of us had very different reactions to the movie, with some people extremely enthusiastic about it. For me, it was unfulfilling, and seems a perfect illustration of two general rules: 1.) novelists should not adapt their own books for the screen; 2.) Great books don't make great movies. A surprising amount of the plot of Salman Rushdie's original novel is retained in the film, and this seemed to me the heart of its problem. A novel of 500+ pages has the room to let its incidents spread out and breathe; a 148-minute film can only include the majority of those incidents if it spends very little time on any of them. And that's what happens. The movie zips alon...